Dönitz: The Last Führer (7 page)

In the meantime the Foreign Ministry joined in the great-power diplomacy to contain the immediate Balkan crisis. Such was the position as the
Breslau
joined an international naval squadron giving effect to diplomacy by blockading the coastline of Montenegro. Because of the delicacy of the situation there was no shore leave and it became interminably
monotonous and uncomfortable, the ships lying rolling to the steep seas of the Adriatic.

One Sunday when the weather moderated somewhat Dönitz decided to relieve the tedium by taking the ship’s dinghy for a pull towards the land, without however setting foot on it. Nearing the shore, he was surprised to see what must have appeared a vision, a woman in a grey-green nurse’s uniform perched on a rock in the water, watching him—and smiling. Soon the dinghy was hard by the rock, one moment lifted by the swell to within touching distance, the next deep below her, while he tried to find a few words which she might understand. He offered her some chocolate ‘which she immediately popped into her charming little mouth with visible enjoyment’,
⁴⁷
and after some while they managed to agree a tryst at the same time and place on the following Sunday.

He was evidently much smitten, but on his way back to the ship, according to his memoirs, the thought struck him, here they were blockading the Montenegrins, and here he was giving one of them his chocolate! He confessed his error when he reported back to von Loewenfeld, but the first officer only laughed at his ‘blockade running’. Taken at face value it is an interesting vignette revealing almost obsessive duty-consciousness. Perhaps it was just bravado to spice up the story for his idol, von Loewenfeld.

The following Sunday he was back in the dinghy paying court, perhaps giving her more chocolate. He was sad when he had to leave and was thinking of her in the loneliness of his watch that night when an Austrian torpedo boat approached at speed and heaved a despatch pouch on to the quarterdeck. It contained an order for the
Breslau
to form a landing party as part of an international naval brigade to occupy the Albanian port of Scutari and free it from Montenegrin occupying forces. At once they roused von Loewenfeld, and the rest of the night was spent in preparations, Dönitz agonizing over whether he would be included in the party as he took down orders dictated by the first officer. He was overjoyed when he heard his name as one of the section leaders.

They weighed with the morning and the party landed the same day at Scutari to occupy the section of town allotted to them by the overall Commander, the British Vice Admiral, Sir Cecil Burney. All the officers were given mounts. That evening as Dönitz was riding between the posts for which he was responsible, trying to discern landmarks in the gathering gloom, his horse shied suddenly at a pack of dogs running
at them, snarling; then it bolted, carrying him helplessly through the streets.

Naturally he felt somewhat ashamed of this first patrol, but the following morning it turned out that several officers had had similar experiences. The town was plagued by these more or less wild packs of dogs, each jealously guarding its own territory. Loewenfeld was not the man to permit such a state of affairs in his sector and, as Dönitz put it, he ‘arranged for the dogs to vanish’,
⁴⁸
The implication of the sentence following is that they were rounded up and shipped to an uninhabited island. Whatever their fate, it can be assumed that Dönitz was witness to a campaign of the sort of ruthless efficiency that marked von Loewenfeld’s actions against Communists in Germany after the war.

As the Montenegrins bowed to the pressure of the powers and marched out proudly by night, the next few months were chiefly spent in infantry exercises distinguished, at least on the
Breslau
, by a strongly competitive spirit towards the other national contingents, British, French, Austrian and Italian. The Germans also had plenty of time to observe the other naval officers as all used the Hôtel de l’Europe as a general off-duty meeting place; Dönitz formed the impression that the German officers could stand comparison with any others—so at any rate he claimed. There is little doubt though that the Germans considered themselves very much better than the ‘Latin’ French and Italians and the heterogeneous Austrian officers, and in general admired only the British. Certainly a story making this point emanated from the
Breslau
in this year 1913 off Albania and spread throughout the German Navy. It concerned a dinner aboard the German cruiser to which the officers of the other navies had been invited. A British Admiral sat next to the German Captain and at one point raised his glass and gazing directly into the blue eyes of the German, as the glasses clicked, whispered a private toast, ‘The two white nations!’

This story so impressed one German officer, von Hase, that when he came to write a book after the war, he called it
The Two White Nations
. To leave no doubt about the moral, he described the French, Italians and Slavs as ‘intellectually, physically and morally inferior’; the British and German officers, however, gazing at each other ‘with flashing eyes’, recognized themselves as ‘representatives of the two greatest seafaring Germanic peoples. They felt they were of the same stock, originally members of one and the same noble family’.
⁴⁹

Racial ideas, whether calmly assumed by Anglo-Saxons who had half
the world to prove it, or worked at earnestly by Teutons who wanted—as much in psychological as material terms—what the Anglo-Saxons had, were a part of the contemporary mind. Everything known about Dönitz suggests he would have shared them to the full. But when he came to write his memoirs one war and a holocaust after von Hase, they had, of course, become unfashionable, and he wrote in a very different vein. He did not mention the private toast aboard his cruiser, and adopted the viewpoint that every nationality has its particular strengths and weaknesses; he contrasted, for instance, the ‘somewhat indolent’ character of the Austrians to ‘the duty-obsessed, correct, but stiffer and perhaps also narrower Prussian nature’.
⁵⁰

In the autumn of 1913 the
Breslau
was relieved by one of the regular battalions of naval infantry from home and the cruiser left the international force. By this time Dönitz had completed the prescribed three and a half years since entering as a Cadet, and he was formally elected an officer by the officers of the cruiser. This was another custom adopted almost unchanged from the Prussian Army; it was designed as the final bar to any dilution of the social and spiritual homogeneity of the officer corps; one objection was sufficient to prevent anyone being elected and there was no appeal.

Having passed this court, Dönitz swore an oath on the Imperial flag—or perhaps an officer’s drawn sword:

He was gazetted
Leutnant zur See
(Ensign USN or sub-lieutenant RN) from September 27th and placed 20th in the rank-order for his year. This meant that he had acquired sufficient points in the practical courses in the summer of 1912 before his posting to the
Breslau
to move him up nineteen places from the 39th position he had obtained in the final exams at the Navy School—an obvious indication of practical talent, which was confirmed by the glowing report of the Captain of the
Breslau
.
⁵¹

*     *     *

The
Goeben
and
Breslau
continued to spend most of their time in the eastern Mediterranean, for the Balkans remained an area of dangerous friction and were, besides, the axis of a German diplomatic and commercial drive towards Turkey and the Middle East; the warships were symbols of German power. For the 22-year-old
Leutnant
Dönitz it was a delightful period, rich in a variety of exotic experiences. From Port Said, where the cruiser coaled, he made journeys to Cairo to visit the Egyptian museum, the mosques, the pyramids and the other monuments to that timeless civilization; in the Syrian and Turkish harbours where they showed the flag he acquired a taste for Oriental carpets, and under von Loewenfeld’s critical eye developed skill in assessing these exquisite works of art. ‘I possessed, for instance, an old “Ghiordes” of such beauty of colour in gold and blue, thus saffron and indigo, that often I could not satiate myself with these colours.’
⁵²

The officers enjoyed strenuous social activity as the representatives of the German empire in the Middle East, particularly in Constantinople, where Embassy officials dubbed the ship the
Ball-Kahn
(Ball-boat). This did not prevent very thorough training in all warlike exercises; indeed as later events were to prove, both German warships were worked up to hairlines of efficiency.

The
Breslau
spent the first three months of 1914 refitting in Trieste, emerging to escort the Kaiser’s yacht,
Hohenzollern
, to Corfu, where Wilhelm spent his annual holiday. For the officers who took part in numerous more or less informal social events graced by a variety of Royals, these were the last days of peace, although none could have foreseen it, the last high days of a social order about to vanish for ever. For after escorting the
Hohenzollern
back to Trieste, the
Breslau
was ordered to join another international squadron off the Balkans, and she was there, lying off Durazzo next to the British heavy cruiser,
Defence
, when news came of the murder of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary at Sarajevo just 200 miles to the north.

It is important to clarify the events following the murder at Sarajevo. They were deliberately muddied by official Germany at the time and after the war was lost. The truth is that the murder was seen in Berlin as the opportunity that was sought to unleash a sharp, controlled—Bismarckian—war.

There were many reasons why the German leaders needed war. Internally they were threatened by the steady advance of the Socialists,
the largest party in the
Reichstag
, now attacking the three-tier voting system by which the land-owning Junker class retained power in Prussia, thus in the
Reich
. These believed they were in a pre-revolutionary situation but, as August Bebel put it, were not prepared to reform their
Junkerstaat
—on the contrary they were determined to hold on to what a modern German scholar, Volker Berghahn, has called their ‘untenable position in a rapidly changing industrial society’.
⁵³
Moreover, they were not prepared to make any more financial sacrifices to meet the huge burden of interest Tirpitz’s fleet-building had laid on the exchequer.

The financial-industrial interest which had set the pace for the new course of 1897 had also become disenchanted. Far from fulfilling its internal goal of binding the divisions within the
Reich, Weltpolitik
had seriously deepened them and with the withdrawal of the Junkers split even the ‘patriotic’ consensus; in external affairs
Weltpolitik
had forced Great Britain to join the opposing continental alliance, ‘encircling’ them and blocking all movement. The Foreign Ministry felt this particularly. In 1911, and again in the 1912 Balkan crisis, Great Britain had given Germany deliberate warnings which had shocked and angered them. They laid the British antagonism at Tirpitz’s door. Even Wilhelm II could on occasions be forced into the realization that the fleet policy had miscarried.

By the end of 1912, therefore, when the fateful meeting took place at Wilhelm’s palace, Tirpitz and the Navy were very much on their own. The Army, the Chancellor, the Foreign Ministry, the Junkers, the bankers, the shipowners and industrialists—and sometimes the Kaiser—the entire Prussian power nexus was against further naval expansion.
Weltpolitik
was not abandoned altogether, simply discarded as an immediate goal. Thinking had reverted naturally to the traditional Prussian cast of continental
Politik
. In fact it was more than that because the new Germany was more than a
Junkerstaat
; it was a world industrial power, and the new policy envisaged a two-stage attack on the world, first continental hegemony, then world power. This was, of course, the policy later pursued by Hitler; like everything else in that second-hand cerebrum it was taken straight from the Kaiser’s
Reich
.

The new policy, discernible at least from 1912 and certainly from the Palace meeting of December 1912, was first to smash France and so reduce her that she could never again either threaten Germany’s western borders or finance Germany’s eastern neighbours, then form a giant German
Mitteleuropa
including Holland and Belgium, the coastline of
northern France, the states of Eastern Europe—thrusting Russia back—and the Balkan countries down to the Mediterranean. This was the first stage—in fact a United States of Europe under Prussian leadership. The second stage was to tack a colonial empire on to this huge power base.
⁵⁴

Following the December 1912 meeting, therefore, the Army discarded its alternative plan for a strike east and worked solely on train timetables and supply programmes for a strike west into France through Belgium; the government and the Army between them blocked Tirpitz’s further naval expansion plans, and the Foreign Ministry set about using the threat of further naval expansion as a bargaining counter with Great Britain to force her to grant Germany a free hand in Europe in return for allowing Britain a free hand on the oceans; meanwhile they sought allies in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Italy. Propaganda was shifted away from depicting John Bull as the jealous arch-rival who had organized the ‘encirclement’ of Germany, instead concentrating on the danger in the east—for Russia was bound to come in when France was attacked.